Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online Page B

Tecumseh was skinned and pieces of his preserved hide were parceled out to the Kentucky troops, who took them home as relics for the edification of friends, sweethearts, wives, and children. With the death of this most charismatic of American Indians also died his dream of a great Indian Confederation—almost, that is, except for one final act in that drama, which was soon to be played out a thousand miles away in Alabama and would set the stage for the spectacular conclusion to the War of 1812.
    If the war in the West finally seemed to be going well, back east it was only more of the same. To replace the hapless Dearborn, Secretary of War Armstrong had chosen a commander with even worse credentials and certainly fewer scruples. He was General James Wilkinson, whom the ever pithy Winfield Scott described as an “unprincipled imbecile”; his assignment, handed down by Amstrong’s War Department, would be yet another attempt to take Montreal.
    Wilkinson’s very presence on the Canadian border belied his well-deserved reputation as a conniver and an incompetent. He had previously been commander of the Seventh Military District, headquartered at New Orleans, which encompassed the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama territories, as well as Tennessee and Arkansas. So inept and loathed was he that his own Louisiana troops refused to serve under him. Yet Armstrong’s idiotic solution to this thorny problem was to send Wilkinson north and put him in charge of the most difficult and important campaign of the war.
    Not only was Wilkinson incompetent; it later turned out that he also had been a spy and traitor on the payroll of Spain, selling whatever secrets the United States had vis-à-vis that shaky Mediterranean kingdom. Furthermore, Wilkinson had been mixed up in the treasonous scheme by Aaron Burr, the former U.S. vice president then in disgrace for the duel that resulted in Alexander Hamilton’s death, in which Burr sought to detach the lower Mississippi Valley from the Union, kick the Spaniards out of Mexico, and form a new nation with himself as king, emperor, president, or what have you. Amid all these strange machinations, as historian Marquis James has pointed out, “for some time [Wilkinson] had been confronted with the necessity of deciding whom he could most profitably betray—the United States, Spain, or Aaron Burr.” In the end Wilkinson betrayed Burr, but not before waiting two weeks to do it so that he could extort $100,000 from the Spanish for revealing this supposedly valuable information. (In 1808 Wilkinson was court-martialed for his role in the affair but acquitted.) In any event, he was the man Armstrong put in charge of the new Montreal operation.
    It started out badly, in part because Wilkinson didn’t want to attack in the first place. The operation was designed as a two-pronged affair, with his 7,500 men moving on Montreal from the west down the St. Lawrence River and another force, under General Wade Hampton (grandfather of Wade Hampton III, one of Robert E. Lee’s Civil War cavalry commanders), attacking from the south with an army of 4,500. Hampton went first, but no sooner had he crossed the border than he ran into a much smaller British force of Canadian militia, which should have been an easy obstacle to overcome. Yet when the Canadians commenced a great howling, firing, and blowing of horns, Hampton was fooled into thinking they were much superior to him in numbers and, after some minor skirmishing, he returned to the American side of the river, set his army into winter quarters, and refused to obey any further orders from Wilkinson, whom he found contemptible. For his part, Wilkinson ran into a British beehive just as he crossed into Canada. At Chrysler’s Farm another inferior British force drove Wilkinson’s army back into the United States, after inflicting casualties at a ratio of three to one. By this point, apparently due to illness, Wilkinson had become addicted to the then popular